Oh, hello, I didn't see you there. Welcome to this page about my mix for the 30th anniversary of Minidisc. You stumbled upon this page either because you received my Minidisc or were just clicking around. In any case, let me tell you a story about how I created this mix.

Initially I thought this would become a House mix because that's the music I listened to back then, and associate with the time. But what I discovered is that much of the music I came to love later found its origin in this year.

Also I discovered that The KLF existed. Crazy stuff, what a guys.

I started out with comparing my memories of the period to Wikipedia's 1992 page. To my surprise they matched up quite well. There were a lot of significant events that year and after much editing I ended up with this summary of the feeling I would like to convey with the mix:

The Cold War is over,
Nuclear disarmament has begun,
A Digital Revolution is erasing borders,
The Environmental Movement is healing the planet,
It's the dawn of A New World.

So pretentious sounding! If I added a question mark to the last line it could even sound ominous and prophetic!

Honestly, it started out as a decade of positivity: old rivalries were put aside, new unions were formed, inequality become an issue to address, science and space exploration were making the ecological well-being of the planet a popular subject and computer technology was advancing quickly. It looked like a time of hope and change.

(spoilers: there were multiple genocides and famines before the decade was out)

How to capture this hopeful feeling in a mix? No idea. But I went with the music I knew the best: electronic. So I listened to the classics like 2 Unlimited, Snap! and 2 Brothers on the 4th Floor. You know, music that every Dutch kid had on their mix tapes. But it sounded dated. Great music, sure, but it didn't convey the feeling I was looking for.

What I quickly discovered is that there were many tracks that where much older than I thought they were. And with much older I mean they were coincidentally from 1992.

Then I also discovered that my favorite music genre, Trance, has much of its roots in 1992. Evolving from House and Techno, the music that can convey emotions even without vocals was already a thing in the early 90s! I honestly thought it was a thing from the later half of the 90s.

Going through many playlists on YouTube and Discogs was a lot of fun. So much good music came out, also in other genres, and I kept being surprised by how modern sounding some music already was back then.

When I did found something suitable there was the challenge of finding a high quality version of it. While many of the more known versions of tracks were readily available, the particular mixes that I liked were sometimes almost impossible to find, even when the mix was released on the same single as the original track! Weird!

Many journeys through the darkest corners of The Internet were made, and many files were deleted after Audacity showed that they were clipping like a fool. With one exception I found FLACs or 320k MP3s versions of all tracks.

In the end, I think I ended up with a string of sounds that captures both the electronic music you (or, at least, I) associate with the early 90s, and those that were ahead of their time.

All tracks on here are from 1992, with the exception of one-and-a-half. It's up to the bothered listener to find out which came out the year before.

For me it was a long, time consuming, but very satisfying journey. I hope you will enjoy listening to the result!

Three of the tracks have some skips in them but I believe those are present in all high quality versions of these tracks, or maybe even in the master recording?

This Playlist can only be burned onto Blue Minidiscs.

It's a secret . I want to keep it a surprise until my match receives gets the disc and has a chance to listen to it.

Some voices say that track 5 and 6 should be swapped.

The last track could be left off. It's more like a bonus track, separate from the rest of the mix.

I made a J-card for a square-ish cases and a sticker for the disc. I will the files for them later because they also reveal the track list.

I had everything printed at a copy shop, and was very happy with the results. I was worried the colors would come out wrong because I had to convert the PDFs from RGB to CMYK colors but that went well. The J-card for my match was printed on 160 grams paper. Slightly thicker paper will probably still fit in the case.

LibreOffice Draw was used to adjust the J-card template that I found, Gimp for the art and text, Scribus to convert Gimp's PDFs to CMYK colors and to turn the text to outlines (so there wouldn't be any font issues at the printer)